Private Dreams and Public Ideals in San Francisco

What a family’s story says about a city of romantic delusions and hazardous fortunes.

The Bay Area has become a battleground between civic virtues and private power.

Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro

My father’s parents met, in 1946, in San Francisco, on a blind date orchestrated as a favor to the American Communist Party. They were young and both a delicate shade of pink. Two friends of theirs, being pinker, saw an opportunity to shore up what might otherwise melt into air. They married in a living room, after an engagement announced by the columnist Herb Caen. My grandmother wore a white lace dress without a veil. My grandfather spent the time before the ceremony trying to thread a needle, to keep calm.

The marriage was an act of quiet liberation. My grandparents had come toward Communism in flight from different local pasts. Steve, my grandfather, spent his childhood, during the Depression, in a big house with a governess, a butler, and a chef. His great-grandfather had arrived in San Francisco in the eighteen-fifties, with brothers, after leaving Bavaria, where Jewish property owners were being persecuted. The gold rush, plus the economic demands of the Civil War, made it a fine time to be in San Francisco, and the brothers thrived in drygoods before marrying other drygoods Jews. They ultimately held a lot of property. They were builders for a while, and then philanthropists. My grandfather was trained in his family’s performance of a public social life for the benefit of columnists and others. It troubled him. “I saw the soup kitchens downtown, and the riots on the waterfront,” he recalled. In college, before enlisting in the Second World War, he joined with labor activists and anti-segregation protests starting up in Washington, D.C.

My grandmother, Pat, did not suffer from the vertigo of unearned luck. She had grown up poor in Alameda and Oakland; her childhood vacations consisted of camping in the nearby woods. When her sister found employment with the California Labor School (later put on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations), my grandmother went to work, at its behest, to “integrate” housing provided for black and white workers at the naval shipyards in Vallejo. Surely to the delight of the Red yentas, she brought my grandfather along. It was their second date. The coupling of unlike pasts is now seen as a safe exchange, but at the time it would still have felt risky and a little new. Pat and Steve attended Party meetings for a while, then gave up. In my grandmother’s words, “It was like a book club where nobody really understood the books.”

Romantic ideas of life, unlike pragmatic ones, concern the bridging of distance to find your tribe, your place, your private order. During San Francisco’s postwar years, romanticism of this kind flourished as the city turned into a crucial testing ground for a new sort of urban mixing. People like my grandparents, freed from the old hierarchies, joined a growing crowd of Bay Area residents trying to build a more open society. Rules changed. Social structures recombined. A new local culture was formed out of the shards of small, personal dreams.

Long after my family’s nineteenth-century fortunes ebbed in San Francisco, I was told stories about the gold rush as if they were charms to ward off California’s special anomie: the feeling of coming from nowhere. Some stories were true. San Francisco had grown largely through the presence of the drygoods Jews whose shadows my grandfather fled. Public space was meant to come from private riches. Stern Grove: woods bought up by Sigmund Stern’s widow, and donated. (The Sterns intermarried with the Hellers, but chose better in their commercial partnerships, and went into business with a drygoods Jew named Levi Strauss.) The nearby zoo: a thirty-acre plot built up by Herbert Fleishhacker, a great-great-uncle, apparently because he had a thing for elephants. Each contribution in this era bought a stake in the imagination of what San Francisco ought to be.

How much has changed since then? Though the Bay Area has recently become a seat of cultural power—the place where digital life is defined, where pathways for community, news, and people-meeting are set—its recent ascent to fluky wealth marks only a return to olden forms. Today, as long ago, the city is in vexed thrall to a cast of fresh-made titans. Now, as before, private gifts are meant to heal the public sphere. Ed Lee, a San Francisco mayor who died in office this past December, liked to praise what he called “a new twenty-first-century philanthropy movement”: the local gentry stepping in to modernize the city. Lucky people no longer require columnists to burnish their progress; they have Instagram. Possibly they own it.

This re-privatization of public life should tell us something about the future. San Francisco has reliably been the country’s tectonic front edge, the place where social frictions and warring mythologies show first in acute form. Today, it is the site of a totemic battle between civic virtues and a growing sphere of private power and experience. Locals lament losing one sort of cosmopolitanism as they turn toward another; the country has followed suit.

But the shift should also tell us something about the past. At the moment of my grandparents’ marriage, the Bay Area was in the process of changing its tribal myths, tilting toward a fresh civic ideal. By the time their hair turned gray, a new private order, with new myths, had emerged, though San Francisco was more than ever aligned with their left politics. How this happens—how a place can break open to a new phase of social confluence and then re-sort itself, without ever changing its beliefs—is the real family story of the Bay Area over the past sixty years. To the extent that San Francisco is still out in front, it’s a story of the past American half century, too.

My grandfather, Steve, was the first in his family to marry outside the tribe of drygoods Jews. He trained as an architect at Berkeley, where my grandmother had also enrolled: tuition was free for Californians. For a while, they lived in a cottage downhill from the cyclotron, putting their first baby to bed in a bureau drawer. In time, my grandfather found work in San Francisco as a draftsman for Erich Mendelsohn—a major influence on the Streamline Moderne movement, which held that a space should reflect the fast lives of the people in it—and they moved. Steve went into business with another young architect, a tuba-voiced German-Italian who had entered the U.S. as a refugee from Nazi Europe and now haunted North Beach jazz clubs. They opened an office above the old Ernie’s Restaurant, where human traffic passed. San Francisco was then moving past its old class hierarchies, remaking itself not from the top down but from the people up.

In “Designing San Francisco: Art, Land, and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay,” the historian Alison Isenberg points to a shift around this time in the way San Francisco practiced its urban renewal. Instead of being designed from on high, in the style of Robert Moses in New York, the postwar city grew largely through collaborative planning. This didn’t mean that messy neighborhoods were left alone to find their internal order (as in Jane Jacobs’s preservationist ideal) but that artists, property managers, activists, and others all got involved. “People who are elsewhere peripheral and invisible in the history of urban design are here networked through the center,” Isenberg writes. The result was a community-trust kind of planning. Isenberg calls it “public-spirited private stewardship.”

Around 1962, when offers started coming for the land surrounding the former factories of the Ghirardelli chocolate company, a potential buyer proposed a design for a sleek high-rise complex. The proposal horrified some people, and the family of a local shipping scion, William M. Roth, was persuaded to buy the plot instead. Rather than simply hiring an architect, Roth solicited ideas from real-estate brokers, landscape architects, and preservationists. He commissioned one architecture firm to draw up a plan for Ghirardelli Square, and then, like a movie producer polishing a screenplay, called in others to do subsequent drafts of buildings. Everybody’s style became a little cramped. And yet the messy pluralism forced differently minded people to work through one another’s sensibilities. Isenberg sees similar approaches in the Embarcadero Center (a multilevel commercial complex, monolithic at first but customized through collaboration with its tenants) and the Crown Zellerbach Building (the city’s first International Style tower, with a garden below).

“The physical remaking of San Francisco, its culture and countercultures, was inseparable from the flux of people and neighborhoods,” Isenberg writes. Meanwhile, a generation of architects, including my grandfather, worked to shape the habits of a new tribe.

“Life style” is a term found almost nowhere in American print before the sixties. Its sunny cousin, “California life style,” appeared around the same time, as a phrase but, more germanely, as a hope. What set the California life style apart was what Life, in a paean, called “indoor-outdoor living.” In the traditional Jane Jacobsian city, public life started outside your door. In the postwar West Coast metropolis, you assembled a personal world from diverse local sources and brought it home, to your private grounds. Domestic space emerged as an extension of the public sphere.

Pat and Steve, moving across the Golden Gate Bridge, bought a hilltop plot that looked onto the marshes and the saturnine eastern face of Mt. Tamalpais. My grandfather designed a house that reflected the modernist sensibilities of his time: glass-and-cinder-block exterior, stained-wood walls, and a fireplace mosaic depicting the developmental life cycle of the honeybee. The living room was open, and two towering walls of books there told the story of one generation’s liberated secularism—Richard Feynman, Alfred Kinsey, Iris Murdoch, Bertrand Russell, and the art of Native American tribes. In time, my grandparents raised three boys, grew marijuana on their roof, and went to see the Mamas and the Papas sing in Monterey. Their house became a hub for people who, a generation earlier, might not have mixed. Some were from the old labor circle or a new Unitarian Universalist one, for whom my grandfather had designed a church. Antiquarian book dealers came by, and musicians in Zen-style robes, and the younger Oppenheimer brother. My grandparents developed a Nick-and-Nora act to account for this curious traffic. “Stephen,” my grandmother might ask my grandfather, very sweetly, “do you remember, in the nineteen-sixties, when that lovely young woman hitchhiker came to live with us awhile?”

The floor was heated, which meant that, when the womb chairs and the couches filled, guests sat or knelt or lay on pillows on the carpet. The house faced backward, with the front door hard to find, so visitors drifted unannounced from the back lawn, and left the same way. Or maybe they had gone outside to read—or to shimmy down a deer path, through the fallen oak leaves and the bay trees on the cliff below. They could be anywhere. That was, perhaps, the point. Much later, living in the East, I’d find myself at gatherings of focussed people trying to tour the room efficiently and leave. In California, the norm was to spend hours wandering in and out of doors, in and out of social spaces, in and out of conversations, in and out of paradigms of thought.

A tribe, to hold its place, needs private history, turf, and a vision of the outside world. What came down to me as family habit started with a tie-dyed generation lounging on those heated floors. This crowd preached love and—in defiance of the old ways—unconstrained togetherness. Isenberg’s analysis, however, suggests that the children of this era undid much of the urban pluralism that their stodgier precursors had wrought. If Ghirardelli Square epitomized collaborative and participatory urban planning, the Sea Ranch, a hundred miles up the coast, helped presage its demise. The site was fifty-two hundred surf-sprayed coastal acres. In the mid-sixties, it opened as an unincorporated community designed by much of Ghirardelli’s cross-disciplinary crew. While the challenge in San Francisco had been to weave a modernist plaza into an old waterfront, the task at the Sea Ranch was to blend a modernist community into the moody bluffs: another place touted as being for the public benefit but actually conceived through private development.

One of the Sea Ranch’s key designers was the graphic artist Barbara Stauffacher, who had made Ghirardelli Square’s signage. She created the Sea Ranch logo—two waves curling upward, like horns—and improvised the geometric, Pop-influenced murals that are its most distinctive feature. But Stauffacher came to hate the Sea Ranch. Individual properties sold for up to forty thousand dollars per acre. She began to worry that she’d participated in a profiteering land grab under the pretext of environmental custodianship. Returning from the Sea Ranch worksite, she later wrote, she experienced an urge to stop at “any bar along the highway not designed in good taste, not exclusive, not an enclave of the rich.”

The Sea Ranch tracks a quiet shift in the postwar Bay Area dream. A decade earlier, the local social project had been to break out of a shell of hardened class and power and, buoyed by private interests, to create a fluid space that was at once civic, commercial, and social: the Ghirardelli model. By the late sixties, San Francisco and the nation had embraced an ideal of an open society, but hippies increasingly dealt with hippies, and Sea Ranchers believed so deeply in their new life that they put their savings behind it: a market was made. People like my grandparents kept entertaining the cosmopolitan crowd that they’d assembled years earlier, but local cosmopolitanism had changed. A Latino community was growing in the Mission. Industrial business was leaving the city. Once, private developers like Bill Roth had worked in good faith to support bottom-up planning. The private-ownership model now held as good faith started to seep out.

In retirement, Pat and Steve joined a watercolor-painting group. Class one day was for landscapes, when the group drove to the coast to sketch. Another was for figures, when tremendously fat models came to the house to pose nude in feathered tiaras. Other members of the old circle, usually clothed, hung out through the week.

Shy, stuttering, and unclever, I never had anything useful to offer these visitors, but, from the time I had to sit on both the San Francisco and the Marin County Yellow Pages to reach the dining table, I loved to listen to what had already turned into a kind of social theatre. Pat, generous and self-doubting, hosted breezy evening parties and elaborate breakfasts when there were people over, then stole toward hungry solitude, reading two or three books at a clip, on days when there were not. Steve had a luxuriance of gray hair and an impish sense of humor that, like a live wire at the family gate, sometimes ran cruel. Their dinner table churned with conversation. Possibly they were talking about Iran, where a female friend had spent years in the Peace Corps. Maybe Pat had put on her recording of the songs of humpback whales—a West Coast treat—and dinner was punctuated by their mating calls.

“Eeeeee-ooooaaaah! ” a whale might exclaim as someone carved a roast.

Probably, they were talking about Ronald Reagan, whose long West Coast ascent my grandparents took as a kind of personal affront. “He wasn’t even a good actor,” my grandmother would murmur.

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhnn,” the whales would moan in the next room.

Another California emerged when I visited my other grandparents, Menchu and Joe. They lived in Redwood City, south of San Francisco. (Slogan: “Climate best by government test.”) They had grown up in Manila. During the Second World War, Joe had enlisted in the U.S. Army, and his regiment had been captured on the Bataan Peninsula. He and other prisoners were marched sixty-five miles to camps, and eventually loaded shoulder to shoulder into a ship called Oryoku Maru, whose sewage-drenched holds could reach a hundred and ten degrees. Unwitting American bombers attacked and sank the boat near Subic Bay; my grandfather swam to shore with a wounded prisoner in tow, then returned twice to the wreckage to rescue others, including his captors. On his release from prison camp, where he spent years writing down poems from memory, he married my grandmother, whose family had been hiding in the hills and whose house had been torched. He secured U.S. naturalization through the Second War Powers Act, and, in 1950, they left separately for San Francisco, crossing by boat through Hong Kong. It was the last time either of them ever saw the Philippines—the last time, in fact, that Joe ever travelled.

Instead, he got an entry-level job at a brokerage firm in San Francisco. He rarely spoke about the war, although he woke from time to time at 3 a.m. and roamed a dark house. When they moved south, to Redwood City, they bought a little property with a front lawn, across the street from a park with a playground. Their three daughters, as they grew, attended swim meets and the polytechnic college down the beachy coast.

Reagan, to Menchu and Joe, suggested a specifically American promise. They framed publicity shots of Ron and Nancy, his cheeks pink, her hair heroically coiffed, and hung them everywhere among the family photographs. By the time I knew them, Joe wore thick George Smiley glasses and a thin gray mustache; he was serious and laconic, with the faintest trace of island pronunciation (“ten tausand times”), while Menchu was outgoing and outlandish, with a pouf of hair in a vanilla-pudding color that looked pink in certain light. She spoke in a brisk Spanish accent, and was given to plucky exclamations. “Aïe! ” she’d say in surprise. In impatience, it became two syllables—“Ai-ïe! ”

I was with Menchu in Redwood City in October, 1989, when the ground began to shake. (“Aïe! ” she exclaimed.) We tried to dive beneath her coffee table, only to find the space blocked by back issues of TV Guide. Stymied, we curled up, forehead to forehead, in a narrow space between the couch and the table, and giggled at our hapless self-rescue. The ground kept jerking, and the TV hissed hard static, and some photos, probably of Reagans, clattered off the nearby walls. But we were lucky.

My mother and I returned to San Francisco that night on Interstate 280. The tricky intersection where the exit scissors across Nineteenth Avenue was dark, and mapped with flares. Men in orange vests screamed cautious vehicles across; the breeze was cool and redolent of eucalyptus trees and cypress. My parents had planned a dinner party, but the phones were giving busy signals, and it was unclear whether anyone would come. They did, though. Everybody came. We lit the dining room with candles, and the guests gripped the edge of the table through the aftershocks. Dinner was warm, intimate, vulnerable. It seemed to show that a private order among people you knew persisted, like a painting, in the absence of civic structure in the world.

It took me a long time to see why that could be anything but good. The earthquake of 1989 was a seam in the urban history of San Francisco. Rather than replacing a collapsed freeway along the bay, the city built waterside plazas. Downtown arteries became boulevards traced by Canary Island palms. The city eventually commissioned a sculpture of a giant foot, to mark the reclaimed “foot of Market Street”: a nexus of the flush, new, knowing Embarcadero. (“To embark is to set foot,” the city’s arts commissioner noted, like a student doped on Derrida.) Some found the project grandiose. “Why not just put a giant penis there?” my grandfather Steve wondered aloud.

Neither foot nor phallus ever emerged. But other local changes did. Through most of the nineties, my father rented cheap office space in the Ferry Building, an industrial wharf structure with a clock tower that, until the quake, had been hidden for decades, poking up between the freeway and the bay. Inside was a Sam Spade labyrinth of bad linoleum, but the offices had giant windows and a swank mailing address (“World Trade Center”), and my father had what used to be the thrill of urban real estate: the feeling of getting away with something.

If you were a kid in San Francisco during the nineties, there was much to get away with, and a flurry of ragged-edged mainstream commerce helped transmute these escapes into local fellow-feeling. Geeks with T-shirts past their elbows tried to open up the world in Linux consoles. Zines were made at Kinko’s. Music, in defiance of the polish of the eighties, met the airwaves with garage-band roughness: hard, bossy, confident, and yet—’Cause I want to be someone who believes—unweary and upbeat. In town, you could watch the dive bars becoming lunch spots that served portobello sandwiches with garlic fries; visit new museums and new stadiums; see empty industrial buildings turn into cafés where the smell of grinding dark roast chased you past the patrons with gauged ears and thick-rimmed glasses into the wide, light-gray drizzle outside. It was a civic project homemade by an energetic new tribe of like-minded locals, and undertaken through bold dreaming in the private sphere. It seemed to us a shared effort to turn the city bright.

People in power appeared to understand. In the mid-nineties, urban planners, architects, economists, transportation consultants, real-estate experts, and government wonks collaborated on a renovation strategy for the Ferry Building. The first floor, they decided, should mix commercial space and travel concourses. The top would remain offices. In between would be public space, a foyer looking out over the water. This vision was reiterated in the port’s immense Waterfront Land Use Plan, adopted in 1997, which aimed to create an “outdoor living room.” As part of the plan, the Ferry Building would have “activities available at different price levels” and no “conventional shopping center or tourist-oriented retail.”

By 1998, the concept had begun, quietly, to change. Four developers submitted plans focussed on making the bottom floor what one reporter called a “global marketplace.” The winning proposal included high-end food shops, restaurants, and more than a hundred and fifty thousand square feet of premium office space. Commercial imperatives took hold. “If you made artisan cheese, you didn’t want to share a space with a low-quality bread shop,” one of the building’s architects explained. As the value of the complex rose, its ownership travelled among private hands. Last year, its current owner, the multinational Blackstone Group, announced that it was trying to sell off the remaining five decades of the master lease for an estimated three hundred million dollars; so far, there has been no sale.

The nineties were not the first time that California’s public resources flowed into the private sector. But the decade marked a turn. Power, as never before, rested with people who had come of age after the atomization of American culture: the boomers, with their vapors of radical individualism, and the my-way-oriented Generation X. While the Ghirardelli Square model of public-private development had emerged from integrative pluralism, the Ferry Building, like the Sea Ranch, evolved to gratify a new and widespread tribal life-style ideal. It is impossible to go inside the building now without entering the shops and ogling premium grass-fed meats, artisanal coffee, or the very popular Humboldt Fog cheese, available for thirty dollars a pound. To partake of public life in San Francisco today is to be funnelled toward a particular kind of living.

The same is true elsewhere, of course. Kids born tomorrow in much of New York City will grow up in an unbroken maze of multimillion-dollar homes atop multimillion-dollar homes atop enlightened eateries. The people they meet in the street will be increasingly indistinguishable from the sorts who show up to visit at their parents’ houses. Whether they will notice is another matter: on the digital platforms where they’ll live much of their lives, these children will themselves be further funnelled, selection toward selection, like toward like.

When the Ferry Building reopened, I was away, in the middle of my first year in an even more filtered environment: Harvard. Getting there, through some quick pedalling, had been a kind of life-style coming-out within my family. I had never really been on Team California, I revealed; I wanted faster, steeper, more. My grandparents were accepting, if bemused. (“I have heard,” Pat said encouragingly, “that people often work best in extremely frigid climates.”) I was fascinated by New England, with its louder tribal codes: the Sox caps and the parkas, the rigorously class-coded neighborhoods, the clammy coffee shops and fry joints on the coast, the ludicrous pink summer pants. Then, in the middle of my second year, my parents called to say that Joe had died.

It was midwinter—not long after the grim, cold two-week stretch of libraries and nothingness before finals. A friendly guy who’d always had his door open in the staircase to my freshman room had just put up a novelty Web site, The Facebook, where you could list your favorite movies and “poke” people from class: a procrastinatory toy less onerous and clogged than e-mail. Harvard, once sharply class-channelled, was determined to remake itself as an affinity community, and The Facebook, though mildly subversive, fit that mold; it was ours, and, unlike the crowded Friendster and MySpace, private, fenced in. I don’t think it occurred to us—except maybe to one of us—that clannish group identity, the romance of people who think that they have found one another against conspiring odds, was the great ordering force of the new global century, and an endlessly iterable one at that.

I flew to San Francisco International for Joe’s funeral wearing an old, extremely miscreased suit that Pat and Steve had bought me for youth orchestra. At the time, Redwood City seemed radically remote from the Eastern sphere of The Facebook, caffeine perspiration, and the ranks of slightly manic, slightly ruthless people into which I was being educated. The air off the plane was dry and fragrant. I felt the lovely, plummeting loneliness of the California coast losing the day’s heat.

A year or so earlier, Joe had shyly shuffled up to me with a question. His sartorial clock had stopped around the time his daughters left home. He wore bolos and flannel shirts and polyester pants. “So,” he’d said timidly, knitting his brows. “Have you decided what kind of business you want to go into?”

I was his first grandchild. I hadn’t said then what I knew already, which was that I wouldn’t end up going into any kind of business, that I couldn’t find the appeal in the life he’d chased. That my goal was to get far from this. In Redwood City, in the summer, the sycamores dry and the grass bakes to a sweet hay smell, and the glaring sun and the tidy corners of the lawns can give you headaches through car windows in midafternoon. My grandfather had spent years inside a nightmare in the hope of bridging the great distance to this heaven. It mortified me to admit that I wanted something else.

American opportunity is notoriously a path of unequal resistance. Test scores track with parental income; Zip Codes predict life expectancies. What these data do not capture is the fortuity and betrayal even in the smooth progress we seek. We say, We’re doing something for our children and our children’s children. We say, We want to give our kids the things we didn’t have. But every palace is someone’s prison; every era’s victory the future’s baseline for amendment. Our children and our children’s children: they will leave our dreams behind.

Long before the founding of Rome, the Etruscans measured time by something called the saeculum. A saeculum spanned from a given moment until the last people who lived through that moment had died. It was the extent of firsthand memory for human events—the way it felt to be there then—and it reminds us of the shallowness of American history. Alarmingly few saecula have passed since students of the Enlightenment took human slaves. We are approaching the end of the saeculum of people who remember what it feels like to be entered into total war. The concept is useful because it helps announce a certain kind of loss: the moment when the lessons that cannot be captured in the record disappear.

The saeculum that shaped the current Bay Area started soon after the Second World War and will end shortly. The lessons that it offers should be clear to anyone who lived across that span. To have grown up through San Francisco’s recent history is to be haunted by the visions of progressivism that did not end up where they were supposed to, that did not think far enough ahead and skidded past the better world they planned. It’s to be paranoid about second- and third-order social effects, to distrust endeavors that cheer on sensibility more than sense. It’s to have seen how swiftly righteous dreams turn into cloister gates; to notice how destructive it can be to shape a future on the premise of having found your people, rather than finding people who aren’t yours. The city, today, is the seat of an atomized new private order. The lessons of the saeculum have not stuck.

A San Franciscan era ended for my family recently. Pat died in 2011, when I was twenty-seven and finding my life as a writer in the magazines she’d once taken as dispatches from somewhere far away. Menchu, after a stretch of wheelchair naps and nonagenarian dementia, died two winters ago: less a hard event, it seemed, than a final crossing onto the dream river that had carried her from a torched house in steamy Manila to a living room in California. Only days after her death, across the bay, Steve lost his sight. His eyes swelled, as if afflicted by allergy, and wouldn’t open. When my siblings and I went to visit him in December, he was propped in a chair, his hair combed with a neatness that it never had when he combed it himself. The lawn outside was rich with California winter light—close, peach-colored, and thick. Since he could no longer read, we had brought him a Discman and audiobooks. We asked what kind of material he wanted next.

Steve pursed his lips and thought for a long time. “Aviation,” he said at last: a dream of somewhere different and new.

A couple of months ago, I flew to San Francisco, from New York, to see his ashes scattered from a boat near the headlands—a distant patch of water that he’d watch, lonely, from his childhood home, before the Golden Gate Bridge was built. San Francisco looked new to me that day: fresh, windy, and bright, a life to be made rather than escaped. We left him there in the water in between two shores, but we also took something with us, one more story for the tribe. The bay was unsettled then, but blue. Our bonds held even at his story’s end. Love, being a thread longer than memory, binds together lifetimes as it runs its fast and ranging course: away from home, and into life, and back again, and through the needle’s eye. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the August 6 & 13, 2018, issue, with the headline “Tribes.”

Nathan Heller began contributing to The New Yorker in 2011, and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2013.